It looks like this past weekend was not only a big jump for Hippy Green, but for youth involvement with the environment. More teens and college students are picking up banners on global warming and getting the message out into the public. High school students are building various things with solar panels like cookers and cars, we are even seeing an influx talk about environmentally friendly college campuses. It’s seems everyone is talking about Green, now its time to put those words to use.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to change NYC to a Greener city by instituting a $8 car congestion fee. This idea of a congestion charge has and is working in cities like London. I know while I was over there this past summer I saw few cars on the road in certain areas at specific times due to the fact that some can’t afford it. Commuting is becoming expensive especially when gas goes to $4 dollars a gallon! I am with Mike on trying to change and slow down the traffic in NYC, but you need to see the BIG PICTURE. People are always going to need to commute into the city, but how are we going to deal with this influx if people are not using cars. We need to look at Mass Transit. Lets get our port authority and NJ Transit, LIRR, Metro North, Subway people together and start to plan for this. We would need more trains and frequent stops as well as new styles of trains. Currently NJ Transit has switched to new double decker trains for the Trenton line, this frees up space for everyone on the train and has plenty of open seats. We need to start adding more of these, but also thinking about the person who is traveling on these trains.

After traveling on these double decker’s both on NJ Transit on from Providence, RI to Boston I can tell you, we need to “add” some features. For once, everyone and their mom has what 3, 4, maybe 5 electronic devices on the train, lets start putting in electric outlets. Now they say, wait who is gonna pay for that electricity. Well lets look at energy harvesting in train stations and frequent walkways and try and gather power from people walking. We can use pads that convert people walking into an electric charge using piezo crystals. Wired had a short article about piezo electric walkways last summer.

We need to start by allowing the people to be heard, the best way is ONLINE! Let’s start by posting up discussion boards and allowing the average Joe commuter to post up his problem about mass transit and allow others to comment and respond. We could even take this to the next level and allow users to post problems like a traffic light out or subway step missing, this information could then notify the right person to fix it. Well it turns out Bryan Helmkamp started to build this project called Fix My New York, part of a idea inspired by Neighbourhood Fix It